The Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma writer-director’s first novel is a wry, hugely fun journey into the dark world behind our screens
Public Access Afterworld is the first novel by Jane Schoenbrun, director of cult-hit horror film I Saw the TV Glow and the more recent Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma; movies in which screens are a permeable barrier and people are menaced by the uncanny realms that lurk behind them. Here the main character is Bethany Peters, a young trans woman working as a content moderator at a YouTube-like company called GlobalVill. Her job is to watch “offensive, illegal, disturbing videos that have no place on the internet” and press a red button to remove those that violate the code of conduct. One night she sees a video posted by someone with the username JulesPublicAccessAfterworld, a visibly malnourished non-binary kid who reminds Bethany of herself “before her stay in hospital, and everything that happened to her there”. The kid says to camera, “If you’re watching this, David Sawyer, this is for you,” then takes out a razor blade and draws it down their arm. Soon Bethany is off on a quest to save them, in the course of which she will learn that she herself is one of “the crooked”, people destined to vanish into Public Access Afterworld, the world behind the TV screen.
There are several other strands to the novel. A nameless patient at the Saint Thomas Youth Rehabilitation Center tells us about a fellow inmate “going by the name David Sawyer” who spends every night narrating a TV programme about a character called Bethany Peters. We meet David again as a lonely teenager glimpsing terrifying images in television static; then again as the cult leader and suspected serial killer to whom Jules and other aspiring “crooked” people dedicate their self-harm videos. We also go to Los Alamos in the final days of the Manhattan Project, where a troubled scientist’s wife has begun to suspect her husband of making something worse than nuclear bombs. In one bravura section we meet Chimotera, the mad scientist/monster of a Lon Chaney-era horror franchise, who is brought back to life in different avatars across successive reboots, and slowly comes to understand and resent his true nature. Schoenbrun ingeniously unites these strands in an ending that manages to be uplifting and nihilistic at the same time.
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